Ah, persistence pays off eventually. Here is a little embedded SVG thing, which has been exported from my new app [which, as you can probably gather, is for drawing pictures]. You need the Adobe viewer [or other?] in order to see it, but theoretically this should have been offered to you for download if you didn’t have it already. Also I should mention that for now this only seems to work for me in IE right now, so if you’re not using IE and this thing ain’t working, just mutter something under your breath and move along ;)

An SVG of Unfortunate Size

The SVG version of the picture above [for those with the viewer installed] is 220K in size, which ain’t exactly small. It would be even larger (700K) if it were not also compressed. Part of the reason it is fairly large is that I have used pen strokes to color-in with [ie scribbling], and just like with Textas, that’s a bit of a waste. Every single pen movement is stored in this file, with no optimization process to remove redundant data points. Another reason it is large is that, for better or worse, SVG is an XML application, and hence made of bulky text rather than more compact binary representations of values. For example the number 14550 takes up 5 bytes [+ spaces] in a text file, but in a binary file could be stored in only 2 bytes. This kind of difference in file size is just one of the reasons that people may be slow to embrace SVG. The ‘native’ representation of this image (in my own compressed binary format) is around 110K.

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UPDATE: With a bit of tweaking on the number ranges used, the use of relative path steps, and the removal of redundant spaces, it seems that SVG might not have to be quite so space hungry. Such measures have whittled the image on the right from more that 230K to less than 85K, whilst maintaining a reasonable level of sub-pixel detail. Note also that this image has been filled ‘properly’ rather than by scribbling wildly. Click on the image to view it as an SVG in a separate window.